The Plains

After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self.“In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,” the narrator tells us. He goes on to recount his day-to-day life in the house with garden where he has isolated himself in an attempt to cut off contact with everything and everyone. Even, possibly, himself. Time is almost palpable here, it goes by without haste and allows you to feel even the tiniest details around you: insects, noises, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth.From a cold damp January, the year unfolds. A garden reveals itself, alongside stories of how we got here—the childhood memories of an Italian veteran of some war who hanged himself after mistaking the lights of the town for cannon flashes; the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie. And closer to now, how he arrived in the city as a student, fell in love with Ciro, and the break-up that prompted him to move away, to this patch of now-carefully tended land.